Friday, March 04, 2005

What Was I Thinking?

It's 1 in the morning. Here's what's on my mind:

-Spider-Man helped me find religion. Oddly enough, this isn't the only team-up between Spidey and the Church that I've seen this week. When Tug mentioned it to me last night, I went to find it myself, and instead ran across a PDF file of a sermon outline you could give to kids that compares Spider-Man to Jesus. It was, of course, nuts.

It includes suggestions for discussions on how Spidey saves people as opposed to how Jesus saves people, why they were both unpopular and underappreciated in their time (which makes me REALLY want to see J. Jonah Jameson harrangue the Lord), and, of course, a discussion of power and responsibility.

I'm going to stress it again, this is comparing Spider-Man to Jesus Christ.

Anyway, my favorite part is at the end, where it says: "No doubt there are some similarities between Spider-Man and the Lord Jesus Christ, but ultimately our Lord is unique."

Wow.

-Tonight was Comics Club, or as we call it around the shop, the two hours before we go to Denny's. It was one of the most fun meetings we've had in a long time.

Phil and I pass his sketchbook back and forth during the meetings as a sort of game between us. He'll draw a picture and I'll go in and add a cover blurb. It's how the Kirby project originally got started, which means I really ought to have those scanned as ISB content. Tonight we only did one, but I think it was worth it. Phil drew an old-style comic book cover with one big image (in this case a scruffy-looking tough-guy with a gun) and three small circles running down the side with other characters in them.

The characters were: A cyclops, a mean looking man in profile, and a little kid with spiky hair that was shiny for some reason.

That's what he passed over to me to write copy for. What I came up with was the title across the top: "ONE-GUN THRILLER!" and in the boxes under the circles, names for the characters (Johnny Cyclops: Monster Detective, The Colonel, and Kid Genius), and a blurb for the bottom:

"One of these men killed Bobby Bullett's partner! He'll kill 'em all just in case!"

It's a fun time.

-Even better than the club is dinner after, which is the one time of the month I get to hang out with guys like Mike Autry. Comics Club basically started out as all the employees getting sick of sitting around bullshitting about comics with each other, so we decided to recruit new people to sit around and bullshit with. Except we charge them.

We always get dinner after every meeting, and our group (made up mostly of current and former employees) has slowly grown to include some other cool cats, making a crazy sort of Comics Club Inner Circle with Phil and Mike (and previously Trey), who are always great to hang out with. Those guys are awesome, and it's a shame we don't hang out more.

-I completely lost my mind and filled a short box with a copy of every Punisher comic we had in the store. My plan is to read them all in a little experiment that Bill Hicks would call "squeegeeing my third eye." I'll get back to you and let you know how that works out.

the basics

"Chris works at a comic book shop so he reviews all the latest releases, but the real awesomeness lies in his ability to find obscure or forgotten comic books and write hilariously sarcastic reviews that make fun of them. They deserve it!"--Blair Butler on G4 TV's Attack of the Show!